a little bit about a lot or, more likely, a lot about nothing

CARNAVAL!

So I have thought a lot about my post the other day and how much I wanted to share on here and discussed it with H. His verdict was that if I would share it on Instagram (which I do not have set to private) then it should be fine to share on here. Seeing as, in general, he is a WHOLE lot more reticent about sharing kid related stuff than I am, I thought this seemed fair. I am not sure if I will change my mind in the future but, for now, the main aim of this blog for me is to share our day to day lives. Not so much with the world but as a memory-log for us later on. We are not having the BEST of times at the moment but in all honesty life is still great, we just have a few more MEH kind of days. There is still a lot of fun and boring normality in the mix. And I particularly don´t want to forget that. O´s mini stress-out the other night made me feel a bit rubbish that suddenly, for him, all he could remember was me being unwell. When really it had been 5 days. And the weekend before we had been out and about seeing friends and doing very normal things. If I can document our fun – and humdrum – day to day on here then sometime in the future it might help him to look back and see the situation in a more complete light. See that, really, there were so so so many more happy days full of light and laughter than there were days of lazy-pants mum in bed.

To that end, the big event of the last week was CARNAVAL! It is not Rio de Janeiro big here but it is much bigger than Halloween; the school has a day when the kids all dress up and do parades in the village (littlies) or in the school playground (bigs). Then the village has a day when there are floats and the kids all dress up and go out to play together until late. This year O wanted to be ´a cool dude´. A quick aside about O, this kid was a dress up NUT as a littlie. From about 3 he dressed up all the time. All the time. Our dress up box is epic. Pirates, firemen, policemen, many superheroes, knights, there is something for almost everyone in there. For several years it was the mainstay of any present giving event, a surefire hit. And then suddenly he turned 7 and he got a Harry Potter dress up (which he had asked for). He wore it once or twice and then. Boom. THE. END. He has never really dressed up again. It was so sudden and not just a little bit sad. This amazing part of a kid that often had people commenting ´does he ALWAYS dress up?´ just. stopped. (sniff, sniff). So I knew he would not actually want to dress up, rather wear something fairly normal that could pass as a dress up. Unsure he would go for it I tentatively suggested GREASE. So we sat down for an impromptu family film night and they LOVED. IT. LOVED IT. My kids have never jumped as fully on the musical bandwagon as I did as a kid so when they enjoy films like this it really thrills me. Y went as a knight with his class, the infants – 3 -5 years – always do a class outfit and it has to be super cheap and if possible using recyclable materials. hence plethora of binbag-based outfits. As you can tell in the picture below he felt extremely self conscious until he got to school and saw all of his schoolmates dressed up. Of course there was no question that on the Saturday he would be a T-bird too.